The Communist Club - Keith Scholey

19th Century Working Class London teemed with clubs: Workers Institutions; radical, secularist and republican clubs, and later socialist and anarchist clubs. Some had their own buildings, while many operated meeting rooms above pubs. They served many roles, holding evening classes for workers, many of who had never gone to school; providing space for the discussion of political ideas and for organising working class political activity, as well as social space run by club members themselves. Clublife was a crucial part of the building of mass movements like the Chartists, the Reform League of the 1860s, the anti-religious Secularists of the 1870s.